Sights and Sounds

Looking forward to this weekend’s Sounds Film Festival. Especially the Woody Guthrie biopic, Bound For Glory, and the opening night’s Ballads Of The Book film which will be followed by live music, including the most excellent Zoey van Goey.

Random Access Memory Forever

It used to be that when you had one of those moments of memory where something from your childhood bobs to the surface of the mental rummage pile you’d perhaps have to resign yourself to the fact that it would most likely only be glimpse,  you’d never get to experience it again.

Of course the internet, and specifically youtube, has changed all that.

I tell you, the number of hours I’ve spent in pubs trying to recall this routine and the name of the film it was in!

(It’s Danny Kaye in The Court Jester, by the way,)

Caught by The Wibberleys

Yes, I know it sounds like something that would happen to Baldrick in Blackadder, but it actually happened to me. Just yesterday evening. And I loved it.

Last night was a GSFWC night, and as I’d a/ a couple of hours to fill and b/ written my requisite 500 words for the day I decided to go see a random movie. The movie in question was National Treasure:Book Of Secrets, which is essentially a lighthearted caper movie. Its agenda (and I assume this continues from the first National Treasure), appears to be the Mythologising of America. And it is of course a load of bunkum. A string of silly ideas that would be laughed out of any of those Mysteries Of The Ancients pseudo-history books, paperclipped together with stunningly ridiculous leaps of logic.

So, what’s it got going for it? Well, there’s Helen Mirren, Jon Voigt and Ed Harris tittering behind their hands as they enjoy hamming away at the action stuff, and even Nicholas Cage seems to have been allowed to have some manic fun at the expense of the Grand British Stereotype. But it was the screenwriting that caught my attention.

There I am, pulling on my coat and checking my phone as the credits rolled and up it came:

“SCREENPLAY by THE WIBBERLEYS”

And I’m like: What the fuck? Who or what are “The Wibberleys”?

I brought it up at GSFWC, and again later at home, and a few suggestions were tossed around. The Wibberleys could variously be:

-  a race of screenwriting aliens from Doctor Who

-  a family of inbred screenwriting hillbillies

-  a little understood area of the brain thought to be linked to engenderment of stories from the collective unconscious

-  a husband and wife crime-solving, screenwriting team – sort of like a cross between Murder She Wrote and Hart To Hart.

And who’d have guessed, it turns out to be the last of these. Actually I’m not sure about the crime-solving, but if you actually call yourself “The Wibberleys”, well you really have to, don’t you?

According to IMDB Cormac and Marianne Wibberley have been writing screenplays for lightweight movies since the mid 90s.

But why I’m I going on about them?

Well, because I believe they’re attempting to resurrect a near dead sub-genre, and given the paucity of control that screenwriters have in the movie making process, they’re doing a decent job.  Remember how much fun The Indiana Jones movies were? How good-natured and uncynical they were? Or Romancing The Stone, or even the majestic Big Trouble In Little China. That’s the kind of thing The Wibberleys are going for and I applaud them for it.

Sure, the movie is full of LayZee-Plot clunkers like: (when the underground cavern containing the curiously small city of gold is flooding with water) “We’re going to have to get that door open or we’re all going to DROWN!”, but for every one of those there’s a nicely judged moment like the backstory subplot in which the Cage’s sidekick having written a Secrets Of The Ancients style book (see above) on the back of their adventures in the previous movie, gets exactly the kind of bookstore signing reaction that he deserves.

So, yay for The Wibberleys. I’ll be watching their output with interest, although I see there’s a treatment of I Dream Of Jeannie in the works, and that might just be going too far for me.

And I pity any criminals who come up against their crime-solving powers.

There was a barber and his wife…

This makes me exceptionally excited…

Golden Oldies

In my teens I watched a lot of bad movies. It was the early eighties, and our family had just got our first VCR. It was a betamax, but in those days video shops stocked movies in three flavours – VHS, Beta, V2000 – so we weren’t stuck for dodgy old horror movies or low-low-budget sci-fi flicks to triple bill on our Saturday afternoons. And I suppose like many teenagers of the time we gorged ourselves on all that nonsense. It’s possible that, despite the 18 certificates, we managed to see quite a few movies of inappropriate content for our tender years, and the purge of the Video Nasty era would soon rob us of the chance, but there was always one movie that I wanted to see, that over the years I even managed to convince myself that I did see at least part of, a movie that was fantastical, a little bit naughty and super violent.

That movie was Death Race 2000.

I know. Stop laughing.

See, I’m now very doubtful that I ever did get to see any of it. Perhaps a clip of it over the years on some movie-related TV show, but maybe not even that. And I’m kinda glad. Because I watched it last night, and I know I wouldn’t have appreciated its full glory back then. Yes, you get to see someone’s head being run over. Yes, there’s a whole bunch of soft-focus nudity (and I don’t think I ever really appreciated the word “gratuitous” until now). But, dude, it’s Wacky Races with the addition of points for running over pedestrians. And it’s absolutely hilarious.

From David Carradine’s itchy-uncomfortable performance as much-repaired, indestructible, uber-racer “Frankenstein” to Sly Stallone’s actually finding the right level of movie for his scenery-chomping. From the unconvincingly modded cars which looked so cool on the video cover artwork (and you always knew that the hand painted video covers were the worst films, didn’t you?) but in reality were maybe one step down from the buggies the Banana Splits used to drive. From the old trick of speeding up the driving scenes to the inappropriate use of cleavage it’s every inch a winner.

It’s a gonzo seventies classic, up there with Shock Treatment, Phantom Of The Paradise, Escape From New York, Harold And Maude – although not as good as any of those really, but it certainly has its moments.

The soundtrack comes over like a weird hodgepodge of found clips from other movies and the results of the big jam party held by the Edgar Winter Group, Herbie Hancock and someone like Chicago.

When the resistance try to sabotage the race, the president continually and for no apparent reason blames the French.

While the racers pass by the local hospital the staff take advantage and declare it Euthanasia Day, lining the more terminally decrepit patients up in the road like skittles.

The attempts by the resistance to do for the racers are about as inventive as Wile E Coyote – complete with detour sign and fake tunnel entrance placed at the edge of a cliff.

And it was produced by Roger Corman.

Seriously, if you love stupid seventies movies. Find this one and enjoy.

“She was a great, dear friend of mine and I shall remember her forever howling down that freeway in the sky, knocking over… the angels.”

Shriek (If ya wanna go faster)

Fans of Jeff Vandermeer’s astonishing 2006 novel “Shriek: An Afterword” (out now in paperback in the UK) will know all about the city of Ambergris and its facility for spilling/creeping/oozing out of the confining pages of mere books and into other media. In probably its most audacious attempt yet to cross-infect humanity there now exists a short film of the story of absent historian Duncan Shriek, his relationship with his odd-ball sister Janice, and his fatal fascination with fungus.

SHRIEK: THE MOVIE
A city at war with itself. A night beyond imagining. And… aftermath. A
short indie film about memory and transformation by Finnish director J.T.
Lindroos, from a screenplay by Jeff VanderMeer, with an original soundtrack
by the legendary art-rock band The Church. The film opens with Shriek typing
up her memoirs from the backroom of a bar. Influenced by early surrealist
films. Set in Jeff VanderMeer’s fantastical city of Ambergris.

Voice cast includes Kathleen Martin as Janice Shriek and Steve Kilbey & Tim
Powles from The Church. With character images by Elizabeth Hand and Rick
Wallace, and art by Scott Eagle, Steve Kilbey, and others.

Links to both high and low res versions at the Shriek site.

Remix

It seems the video mash-up (cf the marvelous ThriftShop XL) has evolved a level of sophistication. Re-cut movie trailers that completely change the meaning of the film.

I was much taken by the recent BoingBoing entry on Mary Poppins as a horror movie, but my favourite is probably this one.

If anyone knows of any more of these, please point me in their direction.

Edit
Thanks to Rich for these.
Not seen Brokeback Mountain, but it seems to have struck a chord. This one, I liked though.

And… actually I see there are tons of these. I’ll have to be selective. If I come across any really good ones, I’ll share.

Our Paris in a top-ten meme kinda fashion

So, we had a classic time in Paris. By the time we were there less than a day, we knew we could live there given the opportunity. Since we got back I’ve been trying to work up the energy to blogalise it, but to be honest I just don’t the time or the inclination. Anyone reading this would be bored titless by the third day. So, I’ve decided instead to do a top ten of the things I liked most.

10. Destroy All Camcorders (deluxe edition).

Okay, I’ll admit to a small amount of misanthropy in my character. Generally, there aren’t many things I really dislike in this world, but tourists are one of them: they dawdle, they’re bulky, they gawp, they queue patiently for hours when they could be doing something worthwhile like drinking beer (I mean how good is the Mona Lisa anyway), they talk too loudly, and wherever they happen to be they act like they own the place. And they constantly take stupidly ill-conceived photos and videos. Constantly.

So, you can imagine how thrilled I was when M introduced me to a fun game to play in to tourist resorts. Destroy All Camcorders. It’s very simple. Whenever you spot someone taking a pointless video (for instance of their stationary mother standing in front of a stationary national monument), you adjust your trajectory for a close fly-past of said camera’s in-built microphone and, raising your broad Glaswegian voice, improvise as bizarre a conversation as you can muster, with the ultimate aim of confusing the hell out of the tourists when they finally watch it back.

I know, it’s horrible, but it’s fun. And who knows if we improvise well enough they might even give them something to laugh at. Besides their stationary mother.

9. Zidane Diorama

The area we were staying in on the Left Bank was riddle with comics and figurine shops (like Forbidden Planet, but much more so). Given that we were a street or so down from the Sorbonne, I wonder what this says about Parisian students. Anyhow, among the many weird and wonderful objets on display in the windows of these establishements, we spotted a lovingly constructed diorama of Zidane (heroically) butting Materazi (with blood flying from a mysterious head wound). We particularly enjoyed the poetic licence employed in replacing the ref that officiated in the final with Collina – who has been retire from international football for a while now! These people have no shame.

8. Supermodels cleaning up dog-poo

At the end of one particularly fine afternoon spent with friends we happened to be sitting drink beers en pression in a café that seemed to be staffed entirely by supermodels. And when a little Parisian dog left a little Parisian present on the pavement outside the establishment, it was obvious whose job it was to dispose of it. Quite a clash of expectations, that.

7. Paris, Je T’Aime – Good Fairy

We went to the cinema. We always try to go to the cinema when we’re abroad. This time we saw one new film in a multiplex on Boulevard St Germain, and one old film in one of the little arthouse cinemas on the Rue Des Ecoles behind our hotel. We recommend both. The new film – Paris, Je T’Aime – is a portmanteau movie that comprises something in the region of sixteen short films each of which is set in a different district of Paris. Some of the directors will be familiar to you, others may not, but pretty much all of them deliver poignant pieces. Memorable moments include the Coen brothers’ segment, featuring Steve Buscemi as a hapless American Tourist who falls foul of the locals on the Metro, Elijah Wood meeting a vampire in the Quartier Madelaine, and the mimes who fall in love at the Eiffel Tower.

At the other end of the spectrum the other movie we saw was a 1930’s Hollywood flick called The Good Fairy. An utterly charming wee movie starring Margaret Sullavan and Frank Morgan (who a few years later would play The Wizard Of Oz himself) about a young usherette in a Budapest cinema who tries to do good things for a random stranger at the same time as keeping out of the clutches of a rich old letch (who keeps remarking that she’s “Simply Marvellous!”). What was especially nice about seeing this in a cinema in Paris is that the theatre in question only showed old Hollywood films, and everyone present was there because they loved those movies.

6. Crepes

For late night, post-pub snack food, even Morello’s chicken tikka kebab is given a serious run for its money by a freshly made crepe loaded with banana, nutella and Grand Marnier.

5. Blackpool Tower

From a distance the Eiffel Tower looks just like Blackpool Tower. Well it does to us anyway. Whenever it came into view (which in Paris is often) we duetted the Entry Of The Gladiator music in tribute.

4. Studio Galande

Another cinema on the Left Bank. This is where they do Rocky Horror on Friday and Saturday nights. The weekend we were there, M guested with them. Utter hilariousness.

3. Picnic in the rain, the other side of Montmartre

M’s friends G, M and their pal B took us for a marvellous picnic in the Parc Andre Citroen. The park was designed and built to replace the old Citroen car plant, and is beautiful. The rain came on lightly while we were eating and I think our friends thought we were just being polite when we told them we found it refreshing after so many days of baking sunshine. Politeness went out of the window on the way back to the car when the heavens opened. Outdoor options in abeyance for the time being we were then treated to a Rocky Horror fan’s tour of Montmartre – where to go to find the right sequins, wigs, shoes, etc.

We also stopped to look at an interesting piece of street art that runs from the Rue Magenta down to the Gare Du Nord. It’s an arrangement of red lines that, viewed from the right spot, joins up to give the impression you’re looking at a two dimensional image that someone has drawn on. Uncanny.

2. Café culture

Breakfasting in the morning on fat cakes and coffee, working through notes on the Nov as I waited for M to return from the pool. Possibly even in the same establishments that Hemmingway and Wilde dossed around in. That was nice.

1. Our friends

The best thing about Paris was meeting new French friends and meeting up with old and new friends from other parts. It was great to spend time with the V’s and the S’s. Lovely to meet the M’s for the first time, as well as Mr C and Mr M.

M, giving up the chance of a shoe shopping expedition to hang out and drink beer, accientally got to sit in on the decision making of a prestigious literary award. Which was great fun.

All in all a marvellous trip.